Dear friends!
We are beggars from Eastern Europe and we do not have the opportunity to do a professional translation into English. Therefore, forgive us for the abundance of errors, we just want to bring our ideas to the English-speaking public. If you can help us with the translation of these diaries - write to [email protected] or https://www.patreon.com/Gene_Sol
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Hello! My name is Gene Sol, I am the founder of Solare Games and the author of the game In the beginning.
It's time to publish my diaries, where I will talk about game design, work on the ITB project and where we will definitely plunge into the fascinating history of the Stone Age.
Work on basic mechanics is coming to an end, and by mid-July I plan to release the project to early access on Steam. The announcement of the game is already there: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1073020/In_the_beg..
After this, the game will be updated regularly with adding new content: new technology branches, buildings, events. From Paleolithic to Mesolithic and further to the bright (or not so) future formation of civilizations. Ideally, I would like to go on the pace of work - one major update per week.
“Why not release the entire game?” Some will ask. “Do you want to make money on a raw product?” Others will ask. The comments are fair, but I have a legitimate excuse for this: because for this game I needed to develop a completely different mechanics, built on principles that are not practiced now in game-dev. I felt like I entered Terra Incognita, and invited my reader and future player to go there with me.
In the beginning ... Or how to find your approach?
I always dreamed of making games. Probably, ever since, at about the age of five, he saw the first Sid Meier’s Civilization. It struck me how our entire complex and diverse world fit into such a game model. And I always wanted to make it more detailed, logical and similar to our reality.
Having opened my studio, I knew exactly what games I want to do. Smart games that will try to reproduce reality as detailed as possible. So that the model becomes so logical and viable that it could continue the game simulation even without the player. And so that the game could create for the player a scientifically authentic image of the story.
Today's popular series of historical games either donate historicity for the sake of softness of the gameplay, or, together with an increase in detailing, increase the complexity of the game, forcing the player to pay attention to a growing set of trifles.
But what if you go the other way?
Why not limit the player to the point of interaction with the game, leaving only the most important and exciting? And the rest is left to the simulation itself.
But then you need to understand what is most important? By manipulating what, the player can have the greatest effect on the fate of the tribe?
First you need to understand that our game is a model, a model of real life, and best of all, the measurable relationship between people is explained by economics. Therefore, in order to find the answer to this question, we had to turn to anthropology and economics. It was necessary to understand how the relationships of people at the dawn of civilization were arranged and how they interacted with nature and with each other, what resources they had?
It seems to me that such a resource is time. Man could rise above the animals, including because he realized the need for labor and consciously began to create intermediaries between himself and the animal way of life. Such intermediaries were the first sticks with which one could beat a prey or a fragment of a sharp stone, with which one could cut off a piece of meat or a bonfire, which must be diluted and maintained. The stick must be deliberately sharpened, a sharp stone - cleverly cleaved, and for the campfire, in general, constantly bring the fuel, solid worries. Man consciously set aside his time to make a tool that does not bring the satisfaction of animal needs here and now, but will help in the future.
So, if it is a matter of conscious labor, then our main resource is the time that a reasonable person can devote to a particular activity. Then, let's deal with the distribution of this time.
Therefore, the game economy is represented by the mechanics of the distribution of people's time. The game move is ten real years and our task is to solve what people will be engaged in for a decade.
How to play it?
In the Paleolithic time went much slower for our ancestors. In order for some processes to manifest themselves, generations must change. The player gets the opportunity to distribute - how much time your people will devote a particular activity. Will your people hunt or fish? To pick berries or mushrooms?
Each person in the tribe: a man, a woman, or a child - contributes to the total pool of “time points”. At the same time maintaining their individuality. For example, you can prohibit or allow women to hunt or children to perform some kind of adult tasks.
At the same time, a significant part of the time, your players still go about their business - most often just relaxing and wandering around.
These people were carefree and contrary to popular belief about the hard life of the people of the Stone Age, in reality they led a much more lazy and imposing life than we. Permanent systematic work is already an invention of the era of the society of the producing economy (when people want to eat, they don’t go to the nearest bush with yummy, but go to prepare lunch from stocks that they have been collecting for a long time). Civilization itself is a human reaction to the deterioration of external conditions and the threat of extinction. But we'll talk about this in other issues of the diary)
Your primitive people are not so easy to do anything. Of course, being a deity controlling the life of a tribe, a player can unscrew the labor slider to the maximum and, for example, make its people do dragging stones all ten years. Then, by the beginning of the next turn, the player will find an event in which there will be a story about how a very strong giant grew up in the tribe, who, thanks to his strength, declared himself the leader and made everyone engage in pointless labor. It all ended badly - the local Hercules was killed, though in passing he interrupted most of the tribe. One more such move - and the game would simply end.
In other words, the game is designed to create a reliable logical picture of events for the player in the form of an interactive story. Even if the player makes mistakes, the game itself will tell him what they will try to present in the form of a story.
In this example, we met with two main aspects of the game: economic in the form of distribution of people's time and plot in the form of an event. The event is the second point of interaction with the player, which stirs interest in the world. There is a granularity of the world for the player.
For 10 years, which lasts a course, a lot can happen in people's lives. And the likelihood of these events depends on which technology branches the player has discovered, which development paths he chose. For example, a tribe that devotes a lot of time to fishing will get more events related to the attitude of your people with the river.
And the player needs to somehow respond to the event. After all, by the river, your people can meet people from other tribes traveling on rafts. And the player will need to decide how to act on his people: hide and not show up to strangers, meet with weapons in their hands, showing that they are ready to fight or make contact, trying to learn something new about the world? This creates a sense of belonging to the game world and makes it possible to influence the most important and brightest events in the history of the tribe.
So the game turns into an interactive story. This is a story about the sapiens family, our possible ancestors, who, fleeing the effects of the Toba volcano eruption, have come a long way to the north. There they settled among other refugees in Europe. In those days, Europe was inhabited by Neanderthal tribes and sooner or later you will have to meet them.
In the game there will be other scenarios, in particular - wagering from the face of Neanderthals. After all, why not try to create an alternative humanity?
The player decides that his people will continue to do and how
will their story. The player will be able to collect this story on his own thanks to the Event System.
All events work on the basis of the same set of conditions as each tribal parameter. So, those processes that generate the drift of technologies and ideas in game mechanics, they can also push to one or another event.
And we get our gameplay: the player controls the economy, allocates time and responds to events. At the same time acting on the brightest events in history and making decisions that will visibly affect generations to come.
The rest: the development of technology, a change in the cultural order of the people - happens on its own, against the background and is calculated by the model. The game gives the player the result of these processes in the form of events, focusing on the most interesting.
Why play this?
Because it's interesting! The game gives the player the opportunity to create a truly unique people and check it for survival. Here the player can have an impact on things that he could never have before!
Each story will be different. The opportunity to play completely different approaches to the organization of society, will allow you to return to the game again and again. Here the player will be able to create a highly developed civilization of the type of ancient Greece. And the totalitarian dictatorship, like Assyria. You can make people religious fanatics living in the world of mystics or nomadic cattle-breeders and terrify the surrounding tribes for thousands of years before Genghis Khan.
I have developed my own approach to development: the principle of the maximum possible reliability so far the accuracy does not harm the fun of the gameplay.
In other words - the game should be primarily fascinating, otherwise the credibility will turn it into some kind of accounting program with hundreds of point settings that the player will have to deal with. This approach also works, but we decided to try it differently))
And I would like to believe that this gameplay will be interesting and my theory is correct - you can combine detail and realism with the fun of the gameplay.
Other approaches (the rejection of historicity or an increase in points of interaction with the player) have honed their gameplay for the last 25 years, but I do not have this time. That's why I appeal to my future players with a proposal to take part in the development.
There is a mechanic, but to make a realistic model, you need to balance it. The game modeled not only the trees of the Stone Age technology development, but also such parameters as the human mentality, understanding of one’s place in the world, attitude to the world and people around, attitude to death. The player can even affect the structure of future families in the wards and determine how the lifestyle of his tribe is formed. Putting numbers on each of these parameters raises a lot of interesting questions, which I, among other things, will duplicate in these diaries. But I would like to receive feedback from the players about the gameplay, the written history and the accuracy of the simulation of people's lives as often as possible. And players will be able to contribute to what this game will be.
Ideally, I would like to bring here professional anthropologists, historians and other specialists who could take part in the development of the game with their expert opinion. In the end, they also always wanted to play a realistic and historically accurate game and grumbled that everything was not so in reality! Here is a chance to make a contribution and make a game on which one could study historical processes.
I always wanted to turn the game into an interactive historical park. So that in the form of stories from the Stone Age, a player would see a realistic picture from which one can make a true (from a scientific point of view) idea of the historical period and the processes of the formation of society.
Today, in the hyperinformational era, when information rushes through us at insane speed, we often do not know our
own history: Who are we? Where are we from? Where are we going? And the real story is often mixed with absurd myths and modern legends.
And in this I see the historical mission of this game: to popularize the authentic image of history.
I hope that the gaming community will support the game, help make the gameplay comfortable and enjoyable. Will take the game as having a right to exist in game dev.
Bring something new to the genre?
I plan to publish these diaries every Friday. If you are interested in progress, then by the weekend there would be fresh news and interesting stories. A week earlier, they will be leaving in closed posts on my page on patreone: https://www.patreon.com/Gene_Sol
If the game and my approach to game development have seemed interesting to you and you want to see our new projects, then help us by becoming patrons on our page. It is there that not even the diaries will be laid out, but our working notes, where together with the players we will be able to discuss such questions as: where did the religion come from and what factors to measure its contribution to the mentality of people ?!
And we are planning a lot of new projects. The ITB engine is already developing the concept of a sci-fi game, where the player will have to build first bases - settlements, and then cities on other planets. There will be room for futurism. We also have a city planning simulator and several economic games that work on the same principle of maximum credibility and even a global strategy, which, perhaps, will become our main series someday. )
And now we are constrained only by the lack of resources. Therefore, by supporting us, you will provide all possible assistance to the development by speeding up the appearance of new content and new games. And also free my head from the problem of finding sponsors or publishers so that I can focus on producing new content and working with our team)
And the more we will have support from the community of players, the more often we will be able to produce cheap or free DLCs for everyone, forming not only a different direction of game design, but also a different monetization model.
Nomads
Now let's talk about the promised nomads, they are nomads. Humanity began with a nomadic way of life.
About 70 thousand years ago, the Toba volcano erupted. A huge amount of ash was thrown into the atmosphere of the Earth and a volcanic night came on the planet. And behind it, and volcanic winter.
To make the picture brighter, just imagine that the sky is black and the day is no different from the night. Darkness lasts for many weeks. And then comes the cold, which you still did not know. The ash particles in the upper atmosphere can hang for years, reflecting sunlight and cooling our planet.
Today, scientists argue how real damage was from this eruption on the nature of the Earth. But it is obvious that for our ancestors in those times it was a terrible shock. Of those after which they make legends about the end of the world.
Our ancestors then lived in the African savannah. They knew how to make a fire and hunted and gathered. Representatives of the Homo species have repeatedly left Africa and settled the whole world, but after the eruption of Toba, the first groups of Cro-Magnon men, our ancestors, began their journey north. We will be watching one such group.
Immediately it should be said that it represents a tribe of people in the Stone Age. These are small groups of about 15-25 people. All of them are to some degree relatives. Big primitive family. Up to half of them are children, if these are good times for the tribe.
They still have no understanding of the house. During the daytime - they disperse over a vast territory. When they want to eat, they are looking for edible fruits. Or prey on small animals. Men once in a few days bring prey from the hunt.
Life in the African savanna is full of dangers. Many predators occupy the same ecological niche and are not averse to eating a human. Therefore, people have learned to work together. Acting as an organized group and using primitive spears, our ancestors defended themselves from dangers. It was the organization, tactics of work in small groups and the use of tools that allowed our ancestor to take a dominant position in the wild.
Low density of settlement allowed not to think about the control of territories. The food was in abundance and when it was close to someone with their relatives - it was always possible to go a couple of kilometers and live there.
At the same time, people were not tied to certain places. They left behind the herds or seasonal changes in the river beds. Did not make any stocks. Why, if everything necessary for life is always within walking distance?
In the evening, you can gather around the fire, fry a juicy piece of fresh meat and listen to a couple of stories from your fellow tribesmen. Idyll.
Only a real catastrophe, which will put people in danger of death, will be able to make them change their way of life. Such a catastrophe could be the eruption of Toba.
The disaster led to a serious famine. Entire ecosystems died, people tried to survive as they could. Some refugees could have thought of moving far to the north.
There they met a completely new climate. Grass-covered steppes and age-old forests full of game. Land that required a different way to survive. And it was already inhabited by local Neanderthals, who are still outnumbered by Cro-Magnons from Africa.
The top of the technological level of our wards is the ability to make stone tools. Still very primitive - ordinary river stones, chopped so as to get a sharp edge. Now the player has to determine who this tribe will be and what path it will take.
How to display this state of people in the game mechanics?
The answer was found in the classic map grid. Each cell is a square, approximately 30x30 km. This is the territory occupied by one primitive community.
Conditional “overpopulation” begins at the turn of about 30 people. When there are more people in one of the communities: children grow up, new ones are born, internal conflicts inevitably begin and people just start interfering with each other. The idyll is collapsing, already to the nearest bush with whole fruits - you have to go somewhere, because all the nearest bushes were eaten up by relatives.
At that time, only the appropriating type of economy was available to our ancestors - this is when people are not engaged in production, and everything they need for life is collected in nature. The reserves of resources were very extensive, but at the same time they were very “spread” over the area. The forests were full of game, but they still needed to be caught, and berries, fruits, roots or nuts had to be reached.
According to approximate calculations, the territory of one game cage (900 sq.km) under the conditions of conducting a primitive society could support 50-60 people before the shortage of products begins. But the tribes seldom gathered on the same territory in such numbers (50 people is a huge crowd at that time), as a rule it was connected with seasonal events, such as the concentration of herds of animals in one place, where people from different tribes came to hunt.
More often, the young people in the tribe just wandered a little further from their relatives and enjoyed the natural abundance.
These economic restrictions were also the main obstacle to the growth of the number of people. Being by nature a super-predator, man could not allow himself uncontrolled reproduction and the number of people maintained its stability for tens of thousands of years. More people demanded more food, but the territory could no longer feed people.
In game mechanics, these restrictions are implemented as a finite number of vacancies available on each of the cells. Take our first cave by the river: the cage allows you to feed up to 100 people if you use all possible food sources, but you can’t build a civilization of 100 people. Sooner or later, you will have to either begin an intensive path of development, or engage in expansion and
begin settling in nearby territories. Whatever choice a player makes, it will require a qualitatively different way of organizing your people.
Intensification of the economy assumes that your people will look for more efficient ways of extracting resources, primarily food. The ability to fish with your hands is very cool and brutal, but a harpoon, a fishing hook and a good net will allow one person to feed much more tribesmen and get more food from the territory.
All this implies a change in lifestyle. And for the nomadic way of life comes the next stage. Your people are far from settling, but they are already beginning to understand the importance of permanent habitats. Hunters can live for weeks in a temporary camp where the tools are kept, animals are being butchered and hides are dried. Production activity is concentrated in this place. People have stocks that need to be stored somewhere.
So people come to a semi-nomadic way of life. Temporary seasonal camps grow on their territory, between which your people move depending on the season. In the summer, they live near water and a source of plant food. In the spring and autumn they move to where the herds of animals are - their main source of food.
For the player, this means that in order to change the lifestyle of his people, it is necessary to build temporary camps for hunters, fishermen and gatherers. Each of which requires the intensification of the economy.
Thus, the game reproduces historicity: instead of a simple transition from era to era at the touch of a button, the player creates authentic conditions for the development of his people. Lifestyle change - it becomes a response to a change in the economic structure, which is more complex, requires more effort, but also more effective.
In the next issue: who are the guardian spirits and the divine player. How can a player fit into the setting of the game for total immersion?
I remind you that you can help develop this game by becoming patrons on this page: https://www.patreon.com/Gene_Sol
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